Disclaimer: Please note that solution presented here is not supported by Microsoft.
UPDATE 23.02.3013: I got information from Microsoft .NET team that .NET framework SDK tools can be installed on Windows Server 2008 so all of this hacking might no be needed at all. Refer to topic titled ".NET Framework 4.5 SDK Tools on Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008" @ msdn.microsoft.com/.../hh852363#rn
At work we are upgrading our product to build on .Net 4.5 and there’s many preparation steps to it. Technically it is easy, just install the update package, however for us with product running as a service in different customer hosting environments and us needing to support several versions of our product in live environments, it is not so easy. All hosting servers must have .net 4.5 installed before any .net 4.5 requiring release can be made, we need to also upgrade all of our development and test and stage environments to make sure the deployment package is built correctly. This is nothing that happens quickly.
Today I will focus on the development environment, where we have long since switched to VS 2012, however are suffering with the migration of TFS 2010 to TFS 2012. I say migration, because our Team Project is using Scrum for Team System v3 template and as many know, the template is long dead. We could upgrade TFS easily, however we need to get rid off the dead process template and move on to something that is being consistently maintained such as Microsoft Scrum v2 p...
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Last week on Friday the 13th of April (for superstitious it might be a bad day, but for us it was good ;) ), we (VS ALM Rangers team working on this guidance) released Branching and Merging Guidance Beta for Team Foundation Server 11. It has been long in the working and it is finally out! You can read Willy’s announcement here. So what's new in the vNext of Branching and Merging Guidance (Beta)? The previous version of the guidance was split in several chunks such as main document, scenarios document, Q&A document, Hands-on-labs, etc. In this version of the guidance we have merged main document and scenarios document together to make the guidance easier to follow. We will continue to merge some of the other documents into the main document. The main document also has new content such as Managing shared resources in TFS Baseless merging guidance Local Workspaces in Team Foundation Server 11 Merge Improvements in Team Foundation Server 11 Additional to basic, standard and advances branch plan we have Branch by Feature branch plan Code promotion branch plan New Hands-on-Labs We have aimed to improve the current branch plans to better explain why and where certain branching strategies are valuable to be used. There is more to come in RC version. We are eagerly waiting for feedback and input from community to improve the content further and make it more valuable to everyone. So please, download the guidance, ha...
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Last Friday the new release of Team Foundation Server Power Tools became available and it is called the August 2011 release. In this release there’s lots of new features and fixes and I would like to make a small stop (already there’s plenty of details out there, so I will not repeat it) on two of them. First, with this release, you can do full-text searching over you work items. There is similar functionality in a codeplex project called Search Work Items, however this is a functionality that was requested on the Visual Studio User voice forum and it is something that has been implemented for the vNext of Visual Studio and TFS. TFS Power Tools make it possible for the product group to bring the functionality to customers earlier. The second is that you can now rollback changeset’s from Source Control Explorer UI – either by right clicking on a specific changeset or on a folder/branch. If you click on a folder or branch, then you will be able to rollback one changeset or a range. The functionality to rollback changeset’s was implemented in TFS 2010, however previously it was only available through command line (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd380776.aspx). NB! If you have never tried to rollback anything in TFS, then when you rollback – the changes will be done on your local disk and you will need to check-in the rollback changes as a changeset to the TFS. The model is similar to merging, but e.g. allows you to rollback a rollback ;) Anyhow, more information in...
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This is a topic I’ve wanted to better understand for a while and never had time to investigate. Also it has been in my backlog to write as a post for a weeks now, and I finally made to writing it. Some of the questions many developers ask daily are – Why is my Visual Studio taking so much memory? Why did I get Out Of Memory exception? Task manager shows I have enough free memory. A developer is normally concerned with these questions when they are running on 32bit OS. It is even likelier problem when you are using lots of plugins/additions to your Visual Studio or solutions with many projects or big projects. The goal of this post is to explain the topic to some degree (I am not a OS/memory expert) and offer a tool and guidance to analyzing why your Visual Studio is eating as much memory as it is. In the end I will offer some recommendations that could help you and that have helped me. Also note that 64bit OS changes the game a lot and I’ve not heard memory/Out Of Memory problems from a 64bit development environment. So what's the problem? Well, the real problem is that Visual Studio (devenv.exe) loads a huge amount binaries (VS components, extensions, user dll’s built by the IDE, …) into its virtual address space. Back when Visual Studio was created such components were smaller and there weren't so many (and although we had less memory and needed less memory, the 32bit OS provided us with a 2GB virtual address space), so the solution of loading everythin...
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This is a tool I first heard of at the MVP Summit and was really excited about, but back then it wasn’t yet released or public. It has beeb available for a while now, however unfortunately I found this our lately.
I am very excited about this because it allows me to see how long the UI thread is working on other things and easily send that feedback back to Microsoft to analyze for future versions. In v2010 there’s still plenty of situations where I have roll my thumbs, while the UI is not responding to my commands – not always due to Visual Studio itself, sometimes due to the add-ins I use. Most commonly experienced and known is the build activity and pre-build/post-build event activities. Don’t get me wrong – v2010 is better than v2008 on this, however not perfect.
Anyway – what is this PerfWatson? Lots of people might know the original Watson from Microsoft as the tool that collects error information, symptoms and sends them to Microsoft for analysis. PerfWatson is a similar tool that monitors Visual Studio for UI latency (how long the UI thread has been frozen/occupied with non UI activities) and if it has been busy for more than 2 seconds, it will collect a minidump for Visual Studio and send the information to Microsoft for analysis so the future Visual Studio versions would have far better UI responsiveness and flow.
You can download them from following links:
Visual Studio PerfWatson (the platform)
Visual Studio PerfWatson Monitor (...
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Microsoft has many channels (such as connect, MSDN forums, newsgroups, etc.) to gather feedback from users, customers, partners, MVP’s. This month a new channel called uservoice has been added to the list. Through uservoice new ideas can be proposed and those ideas can be commented/voted by other people. If some ideas have enough votes (they are important), then it is possible that Microsoft will listen to the people and the vNext of Visual Studio and/or Team Foundation Server will contain that feature or change. This uservoice channel is for Visual Studio, Team Foundation Server and the whole Application Lifecycle Management (ALM). So make sure you give all your ideas. Each user has 10 votes and thus can vote for 10 ideas. Make sure you vote for the ones that are most relevant and important for you, to make sure it will be in the vNext You can vote here: http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/
This is my first post on a refreshed blog. I have had a break – from December to March I was traveling about 75% of the time – first event in Estonia, Christmas, then 1 month vacation in Thailand with backpacks, then a few weeks of work and MVP Summit in Seattle (and a great Summit it was). I had no time to blog. This traveling also caused me a longer backlog of work, and even though I still have plenty to do at work, I cant keep myself away from sharing and writing anymore. I have my desktops on laptop, work computer and virtual machines full of different blog post ideas. With this refresh, i have also upgraded the blog engine from BlogEngine.NET v1.6.1 to BlogEngine v2.5 (a huge improvement – used to have thousands of spam comments and caching that ate up gigabytes of memory). This one feels very stable, administration has improved a lot and themes are nice (there’s a gallery for installing them). I have also split the blog into two – one Estonian (on http://melborp.ee) and this one from now in English. The reason being – I have always wanted to additionally write in English and a few times I tried to get a blog account on the MVP blog site, however for some reason I never succeeded. Anyhow, I have finally did it and created it my own hosting. This feels good, I am looking forward to many new blog posts to share my technology adventures on both this and the Estonian site.